Midnight
Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Exquisite and nuanced in its storytelling, Midnight crafts intimate, humanizing portraits of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc that ask us to behold the women behind the icons.
Midnight is a study in the courage of three women—Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc. Jane Austen was poor in 1802, unmarried and homeless. She had outlines, ideas, and first drafts of her future novels but no place to sit and write them. It is at this bleak moment that she receives an offer of marriage from a rich man. Midnight takes us to the hour of her decision between financial security and her writing life.
When sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin elopes to France with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she scoffs at the cost—life as an outcast. Together they travel through Europe, reading and writing, but Midnight finds her alone, eight years later, pacing a terrace overlooking the Italian shore, watching for Shelley to sail home over stormy seas in a shaky boat.
Joan of Arc, imprisoned in chains, kept her faith for a long year. Be brave, daughter of God, her saints had whispered, you will be saved—and she believes it, until she is taken to be burned at the stake. Midnight is the story of Joan’s final days, between her terrified recantation and her heroic return to the stake.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Shorr (Backlands) starts from the intriguing premise of capturing a pivotal moment in the lives of three famous women Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc but falls short in her execution. In Austen's life, Shorr finds a turning point in the writer's acceptance and then refusal of a marriage proposal from a wealthy suitor; in Shelley's, her coming to grips with her famous husband's drowning; and in Joan of Arc's, facing her sentence to be burned at the stake. In each case, Shorr provides factual background leading up to each woman's critical juncture and enters imaginatively into the heads of her subjects, conjecturing what, for instance, Joan of Arc is thinking and feeling as she is being burned. Shorr, however, makes odd stylistic choices, such as the jarring overuse of sentence fragments, and has a propensity for wordy sentences that say too little ("Hampshire home Jane Austen's terroir, from which had sprung that precise variety of human comedy that connected her..."). Shorr is best with Joan of Arc, but her work too often does not live up to the potential promised by its fascinating women.
